Read The Dutch Wife for Free Online

crutches, others limping badly.
    One of these, a thin soldier with a curiously plumpish face, paused a moment to stare at Rachel. Then he hobbled along with the others past the bleachers and along the street.
    As the parade went on by, an older woman in a black head-scarf sitting beside Rachel shook her head sadly. “I lost my husband and both my boys,” she said. “Maybe they’re better off dead. They say, ‘ Soldiers go straight to Heaven, for they’ve been in Hell already .’”
    In spite of all her resolutions, Rachel Vanderlinden was deeply touched and couldn’t help crying.
    The woman put an arm round her. “There, now,” she said. “You just go ahead and cry. You’ll feel the good of it.”
    AFTER THE PARADE, Rachel Vanderlinden made her way through the crowds on King Street. She was on her way to see a friend, Jeremiah Webber, a doctor at Camberloo General, where she sometimes volunteered.
    They’d arranged to meet at the York Inn, a sprawling building with several bars and a little cabaret theatre upstairs. Rachel went into the lobby. There, behind a table, she saw a man selling carvings. He wore a black hat and black clothes and had a wispy grey beard. Rachel went over to have a look at his carvings. They seemed quite traditional: farm scenes, mainly dray horses pulling covered wagons. The man carved while he sat there, wearing a jeweller’s eyepiece in his right eye for close work on the bodies of the horses and the sides of wagons. His left eye was all bloodshot.
    Rachel picked up one of the pieces to look at the miraculously fine and minuscule work. She held it up close. Then put it down again quickly. For the horses and wagons were ornamented with an endless, interlinked chain of tiny naked men and women performing sexual activities on each other.
    “The show begins soon,” the carver said, looking up at her. His bloodshot eye was glazed and anguished.
    Rachel went across the lobby and climbed the stairs.
    The theatre, like every other part of the York, smelled of stale beer, and the ceiling light was like a feeble sun behind a haze of cigarette smoke. The seats, a hundred or so of them, were taken mainly by uniformed veterans accompanied by their wives and girlfriends. Rachel looked around but could see no sign of Jeremiah Webber. She was considering leaving and waiting for him outside when the lights lowered and the crowd quieted down, so she stayed and watched.
    The curtain opened on a small stage, bare except for an upright glass cylinder, about six feet tall and a foot in diameter. A wooden stepladder stood beside it.
    From the wings of the stage, two performers came on. One was a woman in a long blue robe. Her face was painted so heavily it was hard to know her age or what her real face looked like. Her blond hair was tied up in a bun. Her assistant was a man with a black beard who wore a turban and a white cape.
    The assistant walked all round the glass tube and dramatically tapped it with his knuckles to show how solid it was. His face was distorted as he stood behind it and encircled it with his arms. Then he invited one of the audience to come up and check. A young soldier climbed onto the stage to the applause of his friends. He too tapped the tube with his knuckles and was satisfied it was made of some kind of thick glass.
    Now the performance was ready to begin.
    The woman let her blue robe fall to the floor, silencing everyone for a moment. She was wearing only a pink bodysuit that was so tight-fitting Rachel at first thought she was naked. Some of the men in the audience whistled but were hushed by others. On stage, the assistant gestured to the woman to approach the tube. He took a firm grip on the wooden step ladder, steadying it while she slowly climbed it till she was level with the top of the tube. She placed her hands on either side of the rim and inserted one leg into the tube, then the other.
    Rachel, watching intently, suspected what was about to happen but thought it must